January, 2021
The middle of the night silence. It is different. I want to use it to massage the worries that plead for my attention. I am too tired to listen as they whisper. Will my son get the virus? Will I get it? Will Robert? I move from questions of health to the ones about my future. Will I live into my ninties like Irma who calls every day without fail from her tidy house on Long Island? She reads constantly, keeps up with the news and repeats that Trump belongs in a place where they put the criminally insane. I couldn’t agree more.
I begin my journey in the kitchen, coming upstairs after no more than 20 minutes of ruminating while lying in bed. I remember that my father used to advise not spending more than 20 minutes pleading with oneself to ignore the noise in one's head and just sleep.
There is more silence upstairs. The Christmas tree lights are off, as the glare is too much for sleepy eyes. I pour a tiny glass of milk and break off a piece of banana. One of the two I buy regularly because to buy more means overly soft and brown before they can be consumed. One of the pet peeves I can afford as a privileged white girl.
I sit on the couch and focus on what I can without turning on a light. No curtains on the windows so moonlight or light from another living room offers me shadows. I inhale, exhale, inhale…There is no guarantee that when I go back to bed, sleep will follow. Sometimes I must repeat. Maybe I will sit at my desk to pay a bill or look at the Garnet Hill catalogue. Or sit at the top of the stairs where Cinnamon used to perch. Now Asher, the puppy, careens up and down the stairs. When I pretend to be Cinnamon, as she aged so gracefully, I remember to love who I am even in the silence. To forgive the various transgressions of just being human. The silence becomes more peaceful and settled, and I can listen to different voices. Home as sanctuary, the order soothes and the decision to move a piece of furniture is comforting. I think of my father again.
A few days before he died, he told my mother how beautiful their home was. His fastidiousness and her willingness to do his bidding so he could exult in the space they inhabited soothed him in the silence. He said he would be sad to leave. He didn't know he would have a heart attack in the silence a few nights later. As he stood eating olives from the jar in their mid-century kitchen. He was only 4 years older than I will become in April.
My mother found him in the silence hours later. She called me crying. I was 40, and just beginning to fill my life. He never knew I became a mother or that I married Robert. He didn't know how many times I would wake into silence, and come upstairs and eat a bit of granola, carefully measured. But I think his presence is part of my nightly silence. He used to worry a lot too. Perhaps I spent too much of my time caretaking and tiptoeing around his insecurities and sadness. Maybe not the job of a dutiful daughter. He died before we had reconciled a bit as he worried about me and my future. I wish he had lived long enough to know Nico and Robert, to know of my successes and to see my beautiful home which I tend to with the same fastidiousness.
As I navigate the silence and the stairs and the jar of granola, I think of him. I am grateful for his 20-minute rule and for the years we had. The middle of the night silence is for Dad and me.